Goodyear Announces Farming Innovation Award Recipient

Goodyear announced farmer Richard Ledger as the winner of the Goodyear Farming Innovation Award 2009 at the British Ploughing Championships on 10 October. His Rabbit Fencing Machine was selected as one of three finalists from a wealth of entries to Goodyear in July. The finalists were presented to Harper Adams University College to select an overall winner. Ledger, owner of a family-run arable farm of 1,600 hectares growing wheat, rapeseed, linseed, beans and grain maize in East Kent, was given £3,500 worth of Goodyear farm tyres.

“Richard’s innovation really stood out, it is a good example of the application of agricultural engineering principles to solve a tricky problem. The design makes a usually laborious job simple and easy, this is exactly what we try and get our students to do. By investigating new technologies and applying their knowledge to make processes simpler,” said Jim Loynes, head of Engineering at Harper Adams University College.

After being presented with the Farming Innovation Award, Ledger commented, “I am so pleased to have won the award; it is such an honour. I was privileged to have been selected as a finalist and am thrilled to have won. This innovation won the Inventive Farmer Award at The Suffolk Show earlier in the year and I was over the moon to be in with a chance of winning yet another prestigious award. Winning the award and the £3500 worth of Goodyear farm tyres will aid our farm and give us the impetus to develop other innovations to assist the farm.”

Ledger explained that the idea for the machine addressed both the large area it needed to cover and the small number of people available to do the job: “The Rabbit Fencing Machine came about due to large crop losses as a result of rabbits requiring many kilometres of rabbit fencing to be erected. With a very small team of workers on our farm this task was hugely time consuming and labour intensive. Due to this we thought about ways of making the job a more productive and more enjoyable job. It was during the winter months that we focused on this and came up with ideas for how we might mechanise the job. After exploring a number of alternatives we came up with the Rabbit Fencing Machine.

“In short the machine works by ploughing a furrow along the fence line, then laying out the rabbit wire into the furrow which is then pressed in by a wheel and finally covered up with earth by a powered off-set disc. The design works by inserting the rabbit wire 125mm into the ground and 125mm across the bottom of the furrow to prevent rabbits burrowing underneath.

“The machine has been very successful helping to make the job a lot less stressful and most importantly more efficient, achieving double the output to what was previously managed. The machine copes with all lengths and thicknesses of wire and only needs the posts to be manually knocked in the ground and attached to the wire for the job to be then complete. There is only one working model which we created in our own farm workshop.

“I hope that the publicity of our innovation will encourage other farmers to look deeper into their processes and how they can improve them by spending time on developing their machinery. I would like to thank Goodyear and Harper Adams for recognizing the innovation and hard work put into it,” he concluded.